Work Text:
Prologue
Crazy was the way that Alice never thought this could happen. But perhaps that was one of the benefits, or indeed curses, of being left in the dark. They had just told her Dauntless. Beyond that marker of distinction, nothing mattered. Alice got what Alice considered would happen - she knew she’d get Dauntless without a shadow of a doubt. Her entire life, she had been groomed into the claws of the brave, and when the time came, her blood spilled onto the burning coals and sizzled out her sunken promise in her place - spoke for her as it simmered softly against the silence of the sector. Dauntless.
Cheers had filled the hall and the blood had gone, falling down the fire-cracked charcoal as she left it behind, clutching her bleeding palm in her fist tightly, smirking. For a moment, simply one moment of solemnity, she glanced around at her surroundings, to what could have been. Her eyes fell to Erudite first, but then shifted to Abnegation and scoffed. As if.
No, this was her home: Dauntless.
It would have surprised no one that she would pass her initiations. For her, it was almost too simple - train to train, from roof to net and dormitory to training arena. Alice had a precision, as though these initiations were a fine art. 16, young and bold, ruthless in her takedown of every player in her field. Of course, she faced plenty of competition, and later issues in section two of the staging that set off some alarms to someone she’s never seen. There were issues with her simulation tests - issues that meant some of them had to be recorded manually. This had happened before - in her Aptitude Test.
The people had told her, those conducting the simulations that injected her constantly like a black-clad pin cushion, that her results were faulty and mostly useless to them. Still, they took her simulation times nonetheless and ran with them. That initiation year was a rather messy one, admittedly. Place #4 in the first phase, then place #3 in the simulations, because something worried Alice about how well she had done in the first one, so she slowed herself down for the sake of not sticking out like a sore thumb. All she needed to do was get into the top ten, that’s all it took. She wasn’t going to push her luck. And if something were in fact wrong with her anatomy, she didn’t know (hated to even consider it).
It surprised no one to find her, at long last, in 3rd place overall on the rankings. She had secured herself a place in her faction. For some reason, she knew that she could have gotten a better score on her simulations, but her conservational instinct told her that #3 was good enough. The skill in simulations sparkled a significant idiosyncrasy in the girl - an insatiable trail of unsuitable salience. Why was she good? It plagued her at night like the cold fever that constant questioning eventually became to an insomniac.
Alice wanted answers, she only wasn’t supposed to want them. Questions weren’t so often lauded in Dauntless, so much as blindly speeding into peril was. Everyone knew that Alice was a curious girl at heart - it’s why they called her Alice. Curioser and curioser, they used to tease her in Low Class. By Middle Class, they’d forgotten all about that - as well as her full name - and just kept calling her Alice.
She didn’t even want much - just a book and some new clothes (perhaps ones that weren't black and had strange, criminally connotated symbols on them). She didn’t mind the Dauntless way of life. Hell, she chose to continue living it, but some things weren’t perfect, as always.
Fight after fight passed, day after day, night alone - sleepless. Sitting there, soundlessly shivering and surmising that she was shooting things out of suitable proportion: suspicious of both nothing and something at the same time, and having neither the science nor the self-determination to diagnose the escape room of her mind, her thoughts swam ceaselessly, soon sinking, drowning as her eyes shut and sleep slithered around her consentlessly. She was snagged into a dream - another simulation.
Alice didn’t wake up on the day of her 18 th birthday, for she had not slept the night before. There was something that was shot right between her eyes - the foreboding feeling that this day was already a foregone conclusion, filtered through by the universe and woven by fate bespokely. If anything, this day was more black-dressed than any other. And for the first time in a while, for no explicable reason beyond gut feeling, Alice felt less 18 and more traitor.